


Debt

by mongreldog



Category: Original Work, REZQ
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29556876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mongreldog/pseuds/mongreldog
Summary: Overworked delivery gig worker Thom tries to repay a debt to an overbearing roommate.An excerpt from a longer work-in-progress set in my original "REZQ" future dystopia setting. It establishes some key elements of the setting, such as what life is like for the toiling underclass of future Earth, as well as detailing a typical experience of Thom, a low-level worker in this economy who looks kinda like a dog.
Kudos: 1





	Debt

**Author's Note:**

> Mature for language. CW for alcohol use.
> 
> This story contains animal people.
> 
> To learn more about the setting you can check out the 40+ bits of illustrated hypertext fiction (readable in any order) at http://rezq.space!

The length of Maxine’s neck doubled that of most people’s legs. Though distracted, Thom noticed that the dark markings in her dun coat stretched when she arched that long neck over, dipping her head so that she could put her snout level with his.

“You are looking at my code.”

“I’m not looking at your code, Maxine,” Thom pulled his face away, but she articulated her head to follow him, without moving her body. It was disconcerting.

“I see everything from up here. I followed your eyes. You’re looking at my wallet. It won’t work, you know. It’s keyed to my pheromones. Code’s not enough. Pheromone lock.”

“I know about the pheromone lock.” Thom lowered his eyes, not even wanting to lock gazes with her, let alone dispute her questionable claim. Even when Maxine was relatively calm, her stare was intense. “You’ve said before.”

“There’s a little tiny grenade in it. If you try to open it up without my pheromones it’ll blow your hands off.”

“You’ve told me before. You’ve told everyone. You tell everyone all the time.”

“Good. Then you know. So stop looking.”

Maxine straightened up, though not fully; the underside of the bunk above her was too low for her giraffe neck to extend to its full length. She kept muttering, prehensile tongue moving to wet large lips in a manner that suggested it was habitual.

“Big ears. Big nose. Keep your big nose out. Out of my business.”

She waited until Thom had looked fully away, and then entered the last of the twenty-four digits of her wallet’s access code, before twisting the unit open and tipping various differently-branded coupon chips into her free palm. Maxine had audited her coupon chips probably half a dozen times already today. She would do it whenever she had nothing else to do, which was often. She would sit on her bunk, which was underneath Thom’s, and sort through the various plastic chips, murmuring to herself.

Next to Maxine on the flat waterproof mattress was the sheathed sword she always kept conspicuously about her person, a decorative machine-pressed thing straight out of a fantasy movie. She had drawn it before, in a kind of sombre, self-serious warning, shortly after she’d taken on her bunk lease in the unit, and clearly felt compelled to establish her ability to defend herself. She’d made sure she’d done it in front of each of the residents of the unit at one time or another, so they’d all gotten a good look at it. Honestly, it had looked like the kind of thing that couldn’t cut through a stick of gum—but, as was usually the case with Maxine, you could never really be sure.

Thom was sitting crossed-legged in the middle of the oil-stained concrete floor of the repurposed retail unit, his scrawny tail wrapped around his bony ass, refreshing the DLIVRI staff app on the tiny, cracked touchscreen of his chunky, sweaty phone. _No new assignments in your sector._

Refresh.

_No new assignments in your sector._

Refresh.

He tapped a fingertip absently on the hollow fake rubber toecap of his cheap sneaker. It had been like this all day. It had been like this all month. Even short-distance sublight jobs had been thin on the ground, something to do with DLIVRI undertaking a big recruitment drive in an area where a major corporation collapse had made a few hundred thousand people redundant overnight. Sure, he had had some success with getting some hours at a fulfilment centre recently, but not nearly enough; those with longer working histories and higher feedback ratings were prioritised for work. It would take a lot of time to build that up. Meanwhile he was blowing half of what he earned getting there, eating there, getting back, and servicing debt compounded by their application fee and uniform charges. And now, word spreading about the lack of work around T7 had meant that his Hot Racks account wasn’t bringing much in either, the former airport complex attracting fewer personnel who would need to rent a bed to catch a few hours’ sleep on the way to a job.

Thom was starting to feel like he was never going to pull enough together to pay the late charges on last month’s bunk rent, let alone have enough to cover this month. He got angrier at himself the longer he went without finding a paying gig. Mainly, he was cursing himself for turning down a job a few weeks ago when he had felt physically unable to do it, having gone without sleep cramming in deliveries during a three-day surge period. He wondered whether DLIVRI had flagged him as a slacker for turning down the gig. Maybe the algorithm was offering him fewer jobs. He just didn’t know; it was all so opaque, and the rules could be changed at a moment’s notice. He should have just taken that job, just to be sure. So weak. So stupid. So short-sighted. Never thinking ahead. Too lazy. Now he was going to get turfed out, or starve, or both, or … Thom felt pain beside his head and he realised he had entangled one of his long floppy ears in his fingers, and was twisting it distractedly. He let it go, letting it fall in front of his shoulder, and exhaled loudly.

The room was small and square; its ceilings were low. A four-berth bunkbed assembly had been shoved against three of the walls, with lockers at the end of each bunk stack. The room could, therefore, technically, sleep twelve—though often it would accommodate additional people on the floor, if there was a bit of money to be made from someone who had nowhere else to go or, more often, someone had Hot Racked their bed but needed to sleep at the same time as their subtenant.

There was a broken flatscreen monitor on one wall, a chemical cartridge-powered exowave cooker rested slightly askew on a small pedestal underneath. The room had never been more than a shabby, tiny, prefabricated retail unit, and by now there was no way to tell what kind of store it had been. It had long been converted, like most other buildings in T7, into high-density accommodation for the many quasi-transient workers who serviced the New Old City, as well as those who did space work, T7 being relatively close to the sizeable Kraft-Ryzlip vertshuttle terminal.

Thom fell into the latter category, though working for DLIVRI meant not having to use the dreadful vertshuttles too often. DLIVRI were shipping so much stuff back and forth off the planet from their New Old City depot at the moment that their last-AU personnel could often, for about the same price as a vertshuttle ticket, hitch a ride on a cargo transit up to one of the orbital distribution hubs, where they could then hire a rickety sublight class-four (or, in the case of destinations beyond the Esson-Sol system, a vacuum cutter) to complete the job.

The sliding front door to the cramped unit screeched open on ungreased tracks, letting babble and shouting from the rest of the concourse spill through, before the man who had opened it to enter forced it closed it behind him, capping the noise to its normal muffled throb. He removed a grimy baseball cap and used it to wipe the thick sweat from his bald head, before tugging it back on, and rubbing his wildly grey-bearded chin.

“Ah, Thom, you’re here.” Wyatt slung a sweat-stained cross-body bag onto to the ground next to his bunk.

 _Fuck_. “Hi Wyatt.”

“Hi Thom. You know what I’m gonna say, don’t you?” The older man grinned, and, as usual, even amongst the booze fumes, Thom could smell that one or more of his teeth was rotting.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Look, Wyatt.” Thom laid his phone in his lap and looked up with brown eyes at the man. “Can it possibly wait a bit longer? I’m not getting many jobs right now. And I’m trying to get the money together to pay the rent. I still owe interest on the last late payment.”

“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem, mate.”

Wyatt squatted down in front of Thom, too close. His grin was still painted across his wide, reddish face, planted as it was on his somehow even wider neck. He didn’t look away from Thom as he called up to the bunk. “Hey, Maxine, Thom’s trying to fuck me on a loan again.”

“Huh, yeah, sounds right. He was looking at my code just now.”

“I’m not tryna fuck you Wyatt.” Thom said, getting to his feet and sliding his chunky phone into the pocket of his hoodie. “Even though, uh, you’re _seriously_ my type.”

“Ha ha. Check it out, Maxine. He’s insulting me now. After I lent him money. Kept this roof over his head. Times were I used to be a lot more unkind about things like this. You know what some of my old ‘colleagues’ would do to people who don’t pay their debts?” Wyatt straightened up too, brushing imaginary dust from his knees, even though he’d not even put them on the ground. “They’d find ‘emselves nailgunned to the inside of a vertshuttle rocket nozzle.”

“Uh huh.”

This bit of theatre was what Wyatt wanted, Thom knew. Wyatt was the longest-serving resident of this unit, and made much of keeping a small sum of money that he would lend to others at seemingly low rates of interest. While this activity was ostensibly a scheme to subsidise his drinking, it often didn’t seem to be so much about making booze money as having some degree of leverage over his cohabitees. Being the oldest person in the unit, with many boasted years of raves, underworld connections, fortunes made and lost, and sexual conquests, he nevertheless had not managed to climb out of the endless limbo of T7. He was, more-or-less, in the same hopeless hand-to-mouth situation as everybody else. In the absence of concrete achievement, or a meaningful relationship with others or himself, he gained fleeting gratification from throwing around both his idea of a storied past and his modestly increased financial weight.

There was no shortage of opportunities to do so. Thom, like almost all of his cohabitees, had been through this routine with Wyatt a couple of times before. He was grateful that Maxine was the only other person here; if there had been more of an audience then Wyatt probably would have drawn out this performance even more.

“Alright, fine.” Thom sighed, and keyed open his rental locker, pulling out a thick grey woven plastic tote bag flecked with a few grains of paint, the remains of a logo from a long-dead convenience chain. His bag of miscellaneous junk, kept aside for this purpose. A busted old phone, a pair of sneakers in the wrong size, a few assorted pills, a sealed consumer can of PHOME… The closest thing to “savings” that anyone like Thom could possibly hope to amass right now. Maybe there was something in here he could sell out on the concourse. He’d get a shitty deal, but if it was enough to get Wyatt off his back for a while without affecting the pool of rent money he was trying to protect, it would be worth it.

Wyatt watched as Thom retrieved his belongings, and rolled his head, cracking his neck. “You got enough in there to cover it?”

“Uh, I guess. Probably. I assume we’re going past the vending machines first?” Thom said, sliding a scrawny arm through the loop of the tote and putting it over his narrow, rounded shoulder.

“However did you guess?”

“I remember your last late payment charge.”

“The boy is learning, Maxine! So businesslike! He’s getting a feel for the way of the world! There’s hope for this furry dope yet.” Wyatt clapped a huge hand against Thom’s narrow back, which shoved the doglike youth half a metre forwards; he had to flail his tail to regain his balance. “Come on.”

They headed out through the dilapidated door and into the main concourse. There were vending machines all over this part of T7, some of them working, some of them even restocked on a semi-regular basis.

“Same one?” Thom asked.

“Same one.”

The machine in question was tucked in between two retail kiosks, one offering warranty-busting unlicensed shoe repairs, the other providing gelatinous quasi-meat lumps deep fried in sucrose polyester, with a bundled side of opioid-receptor agonists to quell the inevitable diarrhoea. Like many of the vending units in T7, the whole front fascia of the machine was taken up by an incredibly cheap touchscreen, out-of-register colours blazing through a psychotic rainbow of images as its attract mode attempted to seduce passers-by.

Squinting tired eyes against the strobing, pounding light, trying to see past the screen burn, Thom had to slap the plastic surface several times with his palm to get it to wake into its interactive state. There was an unskippable and highly graphic video ad for home surgery kits for perianal abscesses before the machine provided its item selection menu.

“Can of Xylos.” Wyatt grunted, leaning uncomfortably close to Thom, reflected colours from the screen flickering in his eyes. “Mint if they have it.”

“Alright.”

“It’s under ‘Drinks’, then ‘Spirits’.”

“I’m _doing_ it.”

As Thom proceeded through digital pages, the machine chugged and struggled to keep up, the screens tearing with each animated page turn. He reached the purchasing screen for the drink which, mercifully, was in stock, and rubbed between his eyebrows with one finger, trying to figure out in his head which currency would be the best value to use. As was usually the case, the real-time fluctuations between different corporate-issued currencies were wild, and the prices for each option were changing significantly more than once every second. Thom studied the fluttering prices. You had to kinda tune out, get a sense of which one felt like it was the best value.

Wyatt quickly became impatient.

“Come on, Thom. It’s not fucking rocket science.”

Thom gritted his teeth, a flash of temper overcoming him, and keyed open his wallet, tipping out coupon chips and grabbing one at random, shoving it against the area indicated on the screen. The machine practically had an orgasm as the transaction completed, thanking and congratulating Thom on his purchase with grovelling, groaning enthusiasm. A stubby cylinder thundered down the delivery chute, thudding to a stop behind a plastic dispenser flap that was nearly opaque with scratches.

But, curiously, that wasn’t the end. Triumphant gameshow music exploded from the machine, and a shower of hideous computer-generated stars burst onto the screen, settling like metallic confetti into one large golden word, bookended by apostrophes.

!!!!!!WINNER!!!!!!

“’Winner’?” Thom wrinkled his muzzle, still holding the coupon chip between finger and thumb.

Wyatt straightened up from collecting the can, popping it open before he was even fully upright, and pulling thirstily at the drink. He grimaced.

“It’s warm, cooler must be bust.”

“Wyatt. Look.”

The image shifted. Text filled a window in the middle of the screen, but the words were small, and Thom was a very slow reader at the best of times. Thankfully, it was narrated by the machine by an awkward text-to-speech synthesizer.

“Congratulations, buyer. Thank you for entering the Xylos Sweepstake Promotion. As a winner of this promotion, you are entitled to twenty-four free cans of Xylos bark liquor isolate suspension, to be collected at any Xylos-sponsored concession. The promotion has been encoded onto the wallet-linked coupon chip used to enact the qualifying purchase. Please note that prizes must be collected by the wallet owner of the winning coupon, and that winning coupons are non-transferable. Our full terms and conditions can be accessed at the link given below.”

Wyatt gave a snort. “Huh. You know, Thom…”

Thom’s tail flickered; he looked sideways at the older man, completing the thought for him. “That would be enough, right? That would more than pay it off.”

“Maybe.”

“Come on Wyatt. Definitely.”

The unusual pushback from Thom came mostly from his sense of bewilderment. _Winner._ Maybe his luck was changing after all. Then it hit him. _Collected at any Xylos-sponsored concession. Non-transferable._

He started to paw at the screen again, looking for the brand information section, then the branch locator. A juddery animated map helped him to pinpoint the nearest Xylos-sponsored concession. It was in the D-NY nightclub compound on the dustplain. Thom groaned. Not that fucking place.

Wyatt watched the whole transaction with the half-crushed can in his hand. He downed the rest of the can contents, flattened the empty, and flung it with a clatter into a corner.

“Tonight.” A belch. “We’ll go tonight.”


End file.
